17 July 2013 8:01 PM

Consternation in Israel over the EU’s malicious decision to boycott individuals or institutions situated over the ‘Green Line’ between Israel and the disputed territories. This would presumably include boycotting, for example, the Hebrew University which is just over that line or, even more grotesquely, Jewish residents in Jerusalem’s Old City – where ancient Jewish settlement far predated the arrival of a single Arab, dating as it does since King David who built it as the capital of the kingdom of the Jewish people.

The EU says Israeli settlements beyond the Green Line are illegal under international law. Nothing new there – so do the UN and associated bodies say so. But they are simply wrong.

International law in general is known to be highly contentious and far from authoritative, since it is anchored in no single jurisdiction and arguably therefore constitutes nothing other than international politics by another name.

In any event, the charge that Jewish residence over the Green Line is illegal first rests on the application to this situation of the wrong treaty; and second, totally ignores the treaties which gave the Jews the right to settle anywhere in these territories.

To take the second point first. The San Remo Treaty of 1920, in which the victors of the First World War parcelled out the remnants of the defeated Ottoman Empire, created a geographical area called Palestine along both sides of the Jordan River.

Article 6 of the Palestine Mandate signed by the League of Nations in 1922 stipulated ‘close Jewish settlement’ on the land west of the Jordan River. The river served as the boundary because that year the UK created a new Arab country, today known as Jordan, by unilaterally bestowing the land east of the river onto the Hashemite dynasty and thus giving some three quarters of Palestine away.

That Mandate treaty obligation to settle the Jews in Palestine from the river to the sea has never been abrogated and endures today. The 1945 UN Charter, Chapter XII, Article 80 explicitly says than nothing within it shall ‘alter in any manner the rights whatsoever of any states or any peoples or the terms of existing international instruments to which Members of the United Nations may respectively be parties’.

Now to the main argument mounted by the ‘illegalisers’. This rests on their claim that the Israeli settlements breach Article 49 of the Geneva Convention. But this article does not apply to the settlements. Written in the shadow of the deportation of European Jews to their deaths in Nazi Europe, it prohibits

‘individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or that of any other country, occupied or not…The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.’

But none of the Israelis living beyond the Green Line has been transferred or deported, forcibly or not; they all chose voluntarily to live there. (The only force ever used against these residents was in fact when Israel forcibly transferred them from Gaza into Israel in 2005.)

Moreover, the Geneva Convention applies to actions carried out on the territory of a ‘High Contracting Party’ with a sovereign claim to that territory. But the areas in question over the ‘Green Line’ never belonged to any sovereign power. As remains the case to this day they merely constitute no-man’s land, having never been allocated to any ‘High Contracting’ sovereign state. The only treaty obligations ever made in respect of these areas was in fact to the Jews, who were promised ‘close settlement’ of the land in which they were included.

Furthermore, Israel’s ‘occupation’ of these areas is legal twice over – since it merely gained them in a war of self-defence in 1967, and is thus legally entitled to hold onto them until the belligerents stop waging war upon it. Which they still have not.

As for the ‘Green Line’ itself, this is not a legal border. It has no significance other than where the cease-fire line was drawn in the war of 1948-49 when the Arabs tried to destroy the newly restored State of Israel. Indeed, the Armistice Agreements of 1949 stated that the demarcation lines were ‘not to be construed in any sense’ as political or territorial boundaries’, and were not in any way to prejudice the parties’ claims in ‘the ultimate peaceful settlement of the Palestine problem.’

Which ‘prejudice’ is of course, precisely what the EU is now busily imposing. Indeed, by effectively corralling Israel behind the 1949 armistice line it is forcing it back behind what has been called the ‘Auschwitz border’, since this line leaves Israel militarily indefensible against attack.

This is an act of malevolence. But the fault in large measure surely lies with Israel. For although some may find this incomprehensible, Israel does not make to the world the one case that matters – why Israelis are fully entitled under international law to build their homes in these territories; and exactly how Britain, the EU and the UN have grossly mis-stated and misapplied that international law.

Instead, Israel merely protests that the EU move will inhibit a peace settlement. Which it undoubtedly will. But it will do so principally by upending law, truth and justice – a case Israel never makes in public, thus allowing the irrational hatred of Israel in the west, fed by racist lies and propaganda, to spread its poison unchecked.

The reason it does not properly make this case is partly through the epic dysfunctionality of the Israeli political class (which could fill many volumes). It is partly through Israel’s isolation in the face of the bully-boys of the western diplomatic world. But it is also through Israel’s bleak and despairing judgement that the international community, composed of those who historically and presently were and are driven by obsessive hatred of the Jewish people and which finds expression for that hatred through vehicles such as the UN and EU, will always do the bidding of those who wish to destroy the Jews and is therefore impervious to reason and morality.

News of the EU’s act of existential spite against Israel broke on the fast of Tisha b’Av, when Jews mourn the destruction of the Temple (you know, that Temple, the one that stood in Jerusalem all those centuries ago before any Arabs existed, let alone any Green Line) along with the seemingly never-ending list down through the ages of all those prosecuting their uniquely murderous and baseless hatred of the Jewish people.

Some coincidence. To that list of infamy, the EU can now add its name. For shame.

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06 June 2013 12:14 AM

And so it came to pass. Samantha Power has finally made it into the top tier of the Obama administration.

Power is reputed to be one of President Obama’s closest advisers. Until now, she was the relatively lowly director of multilateral affairs at the National Security Council. With her reported imminent appointment as the US Ambassador to the United Nations, what I predicted at the beginning of the Obama presidency has now happened: that in a second term, he would promote to the front rank those who were so extreme and so dangerous to the well-being of America and the civilised world that in his first term, so as not to frighten the horses, he would keep them in the lower ranks out of sight.

Well, we should all be frightened by Samantha Power.

She is the living embodiment of the way in which ‘human rights’ have morphed into their absolute opposite, and instead of providing a protection against tyranny have been turned into the anvil upon which freedom and justice are being smashed.

A supposed expert on genocide, having argued that nations have a moral obligation to prevent it, she was asked in 2002 as a ‘thought experiment’ what she would advise the US President to do about the Israel-Palestinian problem ‘if one party or another [starts] looking like they might be moving toward genocide’. She responded to this already disturbingly loaded question:

‘...what we need is a willingness to put something on the line in helping the situation. Putting something on the line might mean alienating a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import; it may more crucially mean sacrificing — or investing, I think, more than sacrificing — billions of dollars, not in servicing Israel’s military, but actually investing in the new state of Palestine, in investing the billions of dollars it would probably take, also, to support what will have to be a mammoth protection force, not of the old Rwanda kind, but a meaningful military presence. Because it seems to me at this stage (and this is true of actual genocides as well, and not just major human rights abuses, which were seen there), you have to go in as if you’re serious, you have to put something on the line.

‘Unfortunately, imposition of a solution on unwilling parties is dreadful. It’s a terrible thing to do, it’s fundamentally undemocratic. But, sadly, we don’t just have a democracy here either, we have a liberal democracy. There are certain sets of principles that guide our policy, or that are meant to, anyway. It’s essential that some set of principles becomes the benchmark, rather than a deference to [leaders] who are fundamentally politically destined to destroy the lives of their own people. And by that I mean what Tom Friedman has called “Sharafat.” [Sharon/Arafat] I do think in that sense, both political leaders have been dreadfully irresponsible. And, unfortunately, it does require external intervention’ [my emphasis].

Clearly, despite the careful nods to a (disgusting) moral equivalence Power was not talking about invading the disputed territories beyond Israel’s borders to prevent the Palestinians from committing genocide or major human rights abuses against Israel by wiping out the Jewish national homeland -- an aim to which their leadership remains committed in word and deed.

No, she was talking about invading Israel to prevent a genocide, or major human rights abuses, (her language wasn’t clear, but the point is the same), against the Palestinians -- something which, in any rational universe, not only could not possibly be laid at Israel’s door but also held out the possibility that Israel might commit atrocities against people who themselves make Israel the victim of precisely such atrocities (and indeed, commit them regularly against other Palestinians).

She also suggested that defending Israel was not a cause that should be dear to all Americans and indeed all decent people everywhere, nor that the great majority of Americans do indeed thus support Israel, but that the only people who might be alienated by invading Israel would be American Jews who exercised tremendous political and financial power over American politics.

Subsequently she said of these comments that she couldn’t remember what she had said and didn’t understand what she had meant.

Maybe a clue lies in what she told the New Statesman during Obama’s first presidential campaign:

‘Of course I regret them... I can’t even believe they came out of my mouth.’

Here are some of her other activities to date.

In April 2003 she signed a Statement on Cuba, initiated by the Democratic Socialists of America member Leo Casey calling for the lifting of trade sanctions against Cuba.

Along with Susan Rice (the former UN ambassador, now appointed Obama’s National Security Adviser, heaven help us) and Hillary Clinton, the former Secretary of State, Power is considered a key architect of the disastrous Libyan intervention.

And despite her advocacy of attack or invasion to prevent threatened genocides, she has sneered at concerns about the race to build a nuclear bomb by Iran, which has repeatedly threatened genocide against the Jews of Israel, as a figment of the war-mongering Republican imagination.

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10 May 2013 6:30 PM

Fort Hood, Benghazi, the Boston bombings, Iran/Syria, Israel. The pattern is unmistakeable; the danger to America is exponentially increasing; the scandal is deepening into something nearer to a national crisis.

The Obama administration is playing down the Islamist threat to the US and the free world, empowering Islamists at home and abroad, endangering America and betraying its allies -- and covering up its egregious failure to protect the homeland as a result of all the above, while instead blaming America for its own victimisation.

What is coming out in the Benghazi hearings would be jaw-dropping if it had not been apparent from the get-go that the administration failed to protect its own people in the beseiged American mission where Ambassador Chris Stevens and three of his staff were murdered in 2012, then lied about the fact that this was an Islamist attack, and then covered up both its failure and its lie. (Apparent, that is, to some -- but not to the American media, most of which gave the Obama administration a free pass on the scandal in order to ensure the smooth re-election of The One).

But the administration has form on this -- serious, continuing form. After the Fort Hood massacre in 2009, in which an Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Hasan shot and killed 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas shouting ‘Allahu akhbar’, not only was it revealed that his radicalisation and extremist links had been ignored but the Department of Defense and federal law enforcement agencies classified the shootings merely as an act of ‘workplace violence’.

Weeks after the Boston marathon terrorist atrocity, there is still no explanation of why the FBI did not act against the Tsarnaev brothers, despite having had one of them on their books as a dangerous Islamic radical after a warning from Russian intelligence; and why, as the House Homeland Security Committee heard yesterday, the FBI didn’t pass on their suspicions about the brothers to the Boston police.

Even now, the US authorities are playing down or even dismissing Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s extremist Islamic views. Whether or not the brothers had links to foreign extremists is still unclear. But what is bizarre is the authorities’ belief that if they did not have any such links, they cannot have had any religious motive.

Despite evidence such as Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s outbursts at a Boston mosque, where he denounced clerics' references to Thanksgiving and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as ‘contrary to Islam’, the brothers were described by Philip Mudd, the former Deputy Director of National Security at the FBI and the former Deputy Director of the Counterterrorist Centre for the CIA, as merely ‘angry kids’. Mudd told Charlie Rose:

‘They may be disenfranchised. They may have had a bad experience at school. They may not have friends, and they say, “Look, we want to do something.” This tactic of terrorism is a tactic of the 21st century.I don’t necessarily think these are real jihadi terrorists. I think they’re angry kids.’

You really do have to pinch yourself. How in heaven’s name can a guy like Mudd, with his background in so-called intelligence, possibly come up with anything quite so stupendously shallow? It is precisely such angry, isolated, disturbed kids who are vulnerable to Islamist preachers who target, groom and manipulate them -- whether in person or through the internet -- to believe that ‘Islam is the answer’ and that they are its soldiers engaged in holy war against the unbelievers.

The wilful and perverse refusal to acknowledge the religious nature of this holy war -- and worse, to lay the blame for such terrorism on the the society that is its victim -- is what lies behind the Benghazi scandal.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearings this week produced testimony from Gregory Hicks, the former deputy to the murdered Ambassador Stevens, that was simply devastating for the Obama administration and its former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton -- who infamously erupted, under questioning last January about the nature of the attack,

‘What difference, at this point, does it make?’

Well, Mr Hicks has started to provide the answer. Despite repeated calls for more security to combat the clear threat of jihadi attack on the US mission, Mrs Clinton’s State Department had farmed out its security to none other than a jihadist group. When the fatal attack started, Mr Hicks vainly appealed for fighter jets to buzz the besieged compound. As the Times (£) reported:

‘When a team of four special forces troops were about to leave Tripoli, at Mr Hicks's request, their leader had to stand them down because he was not cleared by senior military chiefs to travel. Mr Hicks said the furious officer told him: “This is the first time in my career that a diplomat has shown more balls than someone in the military.”’

Disingenuously, the Pentagon says in response that no forces could have arrived in time to mount a rescue. But there was more lethal testimony from Mr Hicks.

After the attack, the Obama administration claimed that it had resulted from a protest that had got out of hand over an anti-islam YouTube video. But Mr Hicks testified that it was known from the start that it was a jihadi attack which had nothing to do with that video. The Wall Street Journal reported:

‘Gregory Hicks, the former deputy chief of mission at the embassy in Tripoli, recalled his last conversation with Ambassador Christopher Stevens, who told him, "Greg, we're under attack." Mr. Hicks said he knew then that Islamists were behind the assault. In other words, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice's public claim at the time that an anti-Islam YouTube video spurred the assault was known inside the government to be false when she and White House spokesman Jay Carney said it.

‘Mr. Hicks said he briefed Mrs. Clinton that night, yet the father of victim Tyrone Woods says she later told him that the YouTubevideo maker would be “prosecuted and arrested” as if he were responsible for Benghazi. Stranger still, Mr. Hicks says Mrs. Clinton's then chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, ordered him not to give solo interviews about the attack to a visiting Congressional delegation.’

Mr Hicks further claims that he was instructed by officials not to talk to congressional investigators, and then demoted after he asked why senior Clinton aides had blamed the attack on a video protest. Again, officials have denied his claim of demotion. But the cat is now out of the bag. The Times (£) reports that an email has surfaced revealing that senior State Department figures — including Ms Clinton — knew within 24 hours that the group responsible for the Benghazi attack was linked to Islamic terrorists.

Meanwhile, from the beginning of this affair there have also been persistent questions about quite what the US mission was actually doing in Benghazi. Now the Washington Times has reported this:

‘A U.S. intelligence official tells Inside the Ring that the hearing and congressional inquiries have failed to delve into what the official said is another major scandal: CIA covert arms shipments to Syrian rebels through Benghazi.

‘Separately, a second intelligence source said CIA operations in Libya were based on a presidential finding signed in March 2011 outlining covert support to the Libyans. This source said there were signs that some of the arms used in the Benghazi attack — assault rifles, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades — ended up in the hands of the terrorists who carried out the Benghazi attack as a result of the CIA operation in Libya.

‘The unanswered questions — that appear unasked by most congressional investigators — include whether the CIA facility in Benghazi near the diplomatic compound and the contingent of agency officers working there played a role in the covert transfer through Turkey of captured Libyan weapons or personnel to rebels fighting the Bashar Assad regime in Syria.

‘“There was a ship that transported something to Turkey around the time Ambassador Chris Stevens met with a Turkish diplomat within hours of his murder,” the official said. “Was the president's overt or covert policy to arm Syrian rebels?”’

Was it indeed. If it was, then Benghazi might turn out to be yet another and particularly terrible example of the damage Obama has wrought upon the security of America and the free world.

This is a President who, by persisting with the charade of negotiation with Iran over its race to manufacture its nuclear bomb, has allowed it to become the dominant power in the region.

That is why Iran’s puppet Assad, who has just accrued hundreds of Iran-backed Hezbollah terrorists to help him win his bloody civil war, has been able to slaughter more than 80,000 Syrians and use chemical weapons against them -- while Obama himself may have ineptly armed al Qaeda inside Syria. For the Washington Times report goes on:

‘The official said congressional investigators need to ask whether the president indirectly or directly helped bolster al Qaeda-linked terrorists in the Jabhat al-Nusrah front rebel group in Syria and whether the CIA ran guns and other weapons captured in Libya to the organization.

‘“Every troubling Middle East-Southwest Asia country — Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and now maybe Syria — where the Obama administration made a significant policy push has gone over to Islamists that are now much more hostile to the United States,” the official said.’

Precisely.

The Benghazi attack was not just appalling in itself; nor was there merely almost certainly a catastrophic failure by the Obama administration to protect its people, and then a mighty cover-up of that failure. Benghazi also serves as a symbol of America’s tragic abandonment, under the Obama administration, of its historic mission to protect life and liberty both in its own homeland and in the free world.

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17 April 2013 11:44 PM

What was so moving, in the end, was that Baroness Thatcher was buried as a simple Christian.

Borne on a gun-carriage to St Paul’s cathedral as a great warrior statesman, Margaret Hilda went as a humble human soul to meet her ultimate fate, as must we all. But what a faith she had, blazing out in those magnificent, soaring hymns and readings that she had apparently so carefully chosen.

The funeral ceremonial was pitch-perfect, solemn but beautiful and uplifting, and choreographed and staged with flawless precision. This after all is what Britain still does so well. So much so that some foolish folk have allowed themselves to get carried away and claim that this shows Britain essentially still remains the same great country it always was.

What a short attention span such individuals must have.

Sure, the protests that had been threatened for the funeral, by people whose gross disrespect for the dead suggests an equivalent and alarming contempt for the living, were kept at bay or drowned out by the many who made a point of standing up for elementary decency along the route.

But Britain is now a country where behaviour that was once unthinkable is now routine.

Where the mob is unleashed every minute on social media to make vile remarks, to bully and intimidate. Where reasoned argument has been substantially replaced by vilification and insult. Where so many have been moronically parroting the conformist whine of the day, that Mrs T had been a divisive figure -- as if any true leader does not create argument and controversy.
Where young people are so devoid of compassion or respect for another human being, so convulsed by hatred as a result of their narcissistic incredulity that there can be any viewpoint other than their own, that they actually gloated and danced in the streets over the death of a frail 87-year-old. And then they and those who shared their point of view of Lady Thatcher actually accused her of making Britain selfish and uncaring!

It is indeed becoming a selfish, brutalised, uncaring society. But this is the result of fundamental social and cultural changes -- like the fragmentation of the family, the refusal to transmit a common culture through education, the balkanisation of Britain through multiculturalism, the victim culture which gives a free pass to certain privileged groups for their bad behaviour.
All these changes flowed from the tremendous onslaught by the left upon the Judeo-Christian values of the west, and the replacement of the bonds of duty which keep a a society together by a rampant hyper-individualism and group rights which break it apart on the rocks of selfishness.

Margaret Thatcher’s flaw was to view everything through the narrow prism of economics, and thus fail altogether to appreciate the need to shore up those bonds of tradition, custom and informal obligation which could not be fitted into the model of the free-market.

She left the battleground of the culture war all but undefended. Those politicians who came after her took a culture that was already beginning to smash against the rocks of individualism and delivered, in many different ways and under different political banners, the coup de grace.

What has also been gradually eroded in this tragic process are virtues associated specifically with England -- not with Britain, but with England or Englishness, the dominant culture within Britain: those knightly qualities of gentleness and tolerance, lion-hearted decency, stoicism and emotional self-restraint, innate fairness and a passion for order.

Does Dan Hodges, who apparently finds this argument so ludicrous, really think we shall ever have another leader prepared to defend the Britain that embodied those values?

Our leaders have spent years not defending but wilfully destroying the bedrock characteristics of British national identity, based on that dominant English culture, in order to replace it with something entirely different.

Yes, we still do these great events incomparably well. Yes, there are still the decent British who turn out in great number to demonstrate their attachment to what Britain once represented. But they are being replaced by younger generations who in their uneducated ignorance don’t even know what has been lost, let alone care, and who can no longer even think for themselves to go against the deadening consensus.
That’s why I felt it wasn’t just Lady Thatcher being buried in London today.

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05 April 2013 7:09 PM

Does the Labour
Party really believe it was entirely righct and proper that Mick Philpott, who
has been jailed for life for the manslaughter of six children – five of them
his own -- should have been subsidised on welfare to the tune of upwards of
£60,000 per year? It certainly looks as if it does.

Labour’s Treasury
spokesman Ed Balls has been expressing his horror at the ‘divisive and cynical’
remarks made by the chancellor, George Osborne, who asked why taxpayers were
subsidising lifestyles such as Philpott’s. It would surely have been rather
more edifying had Balls expressed his horror instead at Philpott’s lifestyle.

For it was not just
that Philpott had caused the deaths of six children in the house fire he had plotted with his wife and a friend to frame Philpott’s mistress for arson and
gain a bigger house. It was that he used his women as milch cows, producing
children so that he could live off the welfare benefits they accrued, raking in
thousands of pounds per year in child benefit and working family tax credits as
well as the money his wife and mistress brought in from their work as cleaners.
The more children they produced for him, the more cash he trousered from them –
while all the time treating them abominably.

In other words, he
used his children’s very existence to gain money for his sexually depraved,
drug-fuelled, abusive lifestyle. And while of course other benefit claimants do
not deliberately torch their houses and kill their children, the fact remains
that unconditional welfare payments, in particular child benefit which is paid
on the birth of every child regardless of family circumstances, act as a direct
incentive for the mass fatherlessness and the consequent instrumentalisation
and gross neglect of children that now characterise welfare deserts up and down
the country where depravity, cruelty, neglect, sexual abuse and violence are
the norm.

Britain’s welfare
system, in other words, is inescapably implicated in creating lifestyles of
profound amorality and barbarism. It not only subsidises them, but actively creates
an attitude of mind which is deeply self-centred, regarding the world as owing
the claimant a living, sinking into patterns of indolence, hedonism and
squalor, and treating those who should be recipients of love and duty instead
as objects to be used for self-gratification and as whipping-boys when they
dare make any demands of their own. Worse still, it then perpetuates itself
down through the generations in inherited cycles of dysfunctionality, creating
a class apart which is simply separated from civilised society.

Those who claim
that such an analysis demonises the poor are themselves wholly complicit in
condoning and incentivising the neglect and victimisation of children, the
abandonment and abuse of women and the spreading of violence and hideous
selfishness in ever widening circles of demoralisation and dysfunctionality.

There are many
truly poor and disadvantaged people who, through no fault of their own, really
cannot escape their straitened circumstances but who nevertheless lead lives of
sobriety, orderliness and civilised values. It is hard to exaggerate the fury
felt by these people, who are forced to live on welfare benefits, at the way in
which people like Philpott not only shamelessly milk the system but are treated
as equally deserving as themselves.

But of course, to
the left the distinction between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor is
itself evil and must never be drawn because it ‘demonises the disadvantaged’.
But drawing a distinction between good and bad behaviour and holding people
responsible for their actions is the essence of morality. If you insist on
non-judgmentally rewarding those who behave badly or antisocially, you actively
encourage that bad or antisocial behaviour – and thus you help make victims of
others.

Such non-judgmentalism
is therefore a profoundly amoral position. And that is the position taken by
the left. It not only negates personal responsibility but also free will -- which
is the essence of being human. Shedding crocodile tears for the poor, the left in fact treats them as sub-human – and in its own narcissistic moral blindness,
actively promotes both individual and social harm.

That is the true
evil of the left; and that is the revolting yoke which, by screaming at George
Osborne and Iain Duncan Smith over Philpott and welfare reform rather than
crying out over the dead children and the lifestyle which created that horror, Balls
and Miliband have now hung round Labour’s neck.

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28 February 2013 6:56 PM

Is the United States about to become a laughing-stock
to the rest of the world? It seems to have accrued a Defence Secretary who is the
toast of Iran, and a Secretary of State who is a blithering idiot.

It was hard to imagine that the new guy at State, John
Kerry, could make himself look even more stupid than he has done by his science-denying
belief that the planet is about to fry through man-made climate change. Well,
he has indeed now exceeded such expectations.

First, he
invented a new country. In trying to praise diplomats who were working on
behalf of the United States in the Central Asian region, he thanked them for
their work in ‘Kyrzakhstan,’ according to various media reports, and credited
their efforts in ‘support [of] democratic institutions in Kyrzakhstan and
Georgia’ – apparently muddling up America’s major ally in the war on terrorism,
Kyrgyzstan with its neighbor to the north, Kazakhstan.

Oh dear. Well it could happen to anyone. But a US Secretary
of State?

Then in Berlin, he bragged
to students that in America, freedom of speech was such an absolute that

‘you have a right to be stupid if you want to be.’

Never a truer word, you might think – especially when
you consider that he also said this:

‘People have sometimes wondered about why our Supreme
Court allows one group or another to march in a parade even though it’s the
most provocative thing in the world and they carry signs that are an insult to
one group or another’,

and where he said it – in Germany, where neo-Nazi
expressions are banned and with very good reason. We now look forward to Mr Kerry’s
denunciations of those in America (such as his predecessor, Hillary Clinton) who
protest that disobliging references to Islam should be suppressed as ‘Islamophobia’.

Then there’s Chuck Hagel, now confirmed as Secretary
for Defence thanks to brain-dead or spineless Republicans who failed to block
his appointment.

This despite Hagel’s opposition to sanctions against Iran; his
refusal to call Iran’s Republican Guards or Hezbollah terrorist organisations; his
animus towards Israel and his claim that the ‘Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of
people up here’; his questionable comments about homosexuals ;and his
stunningly inept and incompetent performance at his confirmation hearing, where
he first said:

‘I support the president’s strong position on
containment’

and then, after being handed a note, wittered:

‘If I said that, I meant to say that obviously, his
position on containment, we don’t have a position on containment.’

Would you even give a job reading the weather forecast
to such a person?

Now it turns out that Hagel has also
upset India by having suggested, in a previously unreleased 2011 speech,
that India has ‘for many years’ sponsored terrorist activities against Pakistan
in Afghanistan.

No wonder the Indians have responded in fury that his
remarks were not grounded in reality, ‘paranoid’ and ‘over the top’.

Not so much a Defence Secretary, then, as an Offence
Secretary – upsetting America’s allies and sucking up to its mortal enemies.

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22 February 2013 10:08 PM

The movie
Lincoln, which I have just seen, is a magnificent piece of cinematic theatre,
with a mesmeric performance by Daniel Day Lewis which deserves all the plaudits
heaped upon it. Given the current state of American and indeed western
politics, however, the movie packs a particular punch that its writer and
director, those confirmed Democrats Tony Kushner and Steven Spielberg, surely
never intended.

For of course
what is so startling in today's world is that it shows the Republicans
seeking and bringing an end to slavery
while the Democrats fought to retain it, terrified as they were of what it
presaged -- not just votes for 'Negroes' but true human equality, votes for
women and the unconscionable spectre of universal suffrage.

Whatever
fictions mar this script – and there have been claims that it falsely sanitises
and sanctifies Lincoln -- it cannot but
provoke thoughts about the current pathetic state of the Republican Party and
of Conservatism across the pond. For here was Republicanism, the so-called
conservative cause, on the side of morality, decency, justice and progress,
while the Democrats stood for bigotry, injustice and the most reactionary
instincts.

And here was a Republican President of the United States who, with
all the odds supposedly against his great reforming measure and apparently
facing the most invidious of moral choices, never flinched from his duty to
stand and fight for what he believed in.

Today,
Republicans and Conservatives don't know what they believe in, nor what cause
they should be fighting for or against. Divided among themselves, they are
incapable of showing any backbone in fighting today's injustices and
extinctions of freedom because they are incapable of recognising them for what
they are -- and some of these conservatives even believe they represent the
justice and freedom they actually negate -- or because they have been cowed and
terrified by the institutionalised bullying which now characterises their
liberal opponents; or both.

What I expect
was not in the minds of either Kushner or Spielberg was that, in our
modern age, the great cause of liberty has indeed come to threaten civilised
values. And it is the Democrats and their liberal comrades in the west who have
brought that about by turning the truly progressive values, against which the
southern Democrat red-necks fought in the Civil War, on their heads. They have
done this by hijacking concepts such as freedom, slavery, justice and equality
and twisting them into their very opposites.

The fight for
freedom against slavery has characterised the struggle for civilisation since
the earliest times. In the 19th century, it was a motif which did not just
focus on the emancipation of black people but underpinned just about every
progressive movement, from the temperance movement to opposition to vivisection
to votes for women and universal
suffrage.

That was because, at the root of all these great reforming causes,
lay the belief in the equality of all human beings because all were created in
the image of God. The core values we
associate with western civilisation, such as freedom under law and innate human
dignity, all rested on that core belief. That’s why all these great reforming
movements were rooted in a muscular, Bible-believing Christianity.

But in the
second half of the 20th century, that core belief took a terrible hit under the
onslaught from secularism, and for many it simply died along with religious
belief. What then happened was that western liberalism, like the mythological
pelican, started to eat itself. With God exiled from the garden of reason, the
west slithered into moral and cultural relativism. Telling itself that everyone
was his or her own autonomous moral authority, it redefined equality as
identicality, justice as group rights and freedom as libertinism with no
external constraints on individual appetites.

The result glad
been that so called progressives have turned into reactionary bullies. Western
society has turned into a Hobbesian war of all against all, in which those with
the most muscle win and the weak are trampled down. Belief in innate human
dignity has been effaced by a shallow and ultimately lethal utilitarian belief
that the only worthwhile lives are those which others deem to contribute to the
store of human happiness. Those people -- such as the faithful followers of
Biblical morality -- who dare dissent from any aspect of the liberal catechism
are vilified as bigots and imbeciles and turned into social pariahs. All of
this has not expanded freedom but cast a baleful totalitarian shadow, no less,
over western society.

And yet in the
face of this progressive extinction of justice and freedom, today's Conservatives
and Republicans are paralysed like rabbits in the headlights of an advancing
juggernaut. The principal reason why Obama is in his second term in the White
House' advancing his agenda of constraining American power to spread freedom
abroad while expanding state control of the individual at home (in his or her
own interests, of course), is not the rotten American media (culpable as they
are) but the silence and feebleness of the Republicans, who have never pursued
the Obamabots as they should have done.

And just look
at the British Prime Minister David Cameron, a supposed Conservative but who is
not just totally star-struck by Obama but actually extolled the 'community
activism' of Obama's ideological mentor, the revolutionary communist agitator
Saul Alinsky. And because no-one in the British Conservative Party had even
heard of Saul Alinsky -- who dedicated his seminal work, Rules for Radicals, to
Lucifer -- none of these boobies raised an eyebrow at the subversive banner
behind which their leader had lined up the Conservative Party.

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18 February 2013 4:52 PM

If anyone still doubts that European culture is
suffering from a terminal sickness, and that the poison in its bloodstream is oozing
out foully to pollute the atmosphere as it steadily disintegrates, what has
happened to Lars Hedegaard stands as a graphic corrective.

Hedegaard, President of the Danish Free Press Society
and The International Free Press Society, is the nearest thing to a
quintessential European liberal. He is a heroic icon of the fight against
tyranny. He believes in freedom of expression, life and liberty. He not only
detests those who threaten to destroy those things, but has been prepared to
stand up and be counted in the fight to defend them.

As such, he was reported speaking in his own home about
child abuse and violence against women in Muslim culture. The day after these
remarks were published, he stressed that his opinions were not intended to
refer to all Muslims.

What then happened to him was the kind of nightmare associated
with totalitarian regimes, and which I wrote about in 2011 here
and here.
He was put on trial in Denmark accused of hate speech and racism. He was unable
to mount a defence, because under the Orwellian rules of the Danish legal
system he was in effect convicted before his trial even took place.

After a
roller-coaster of a case in which verdicts went first one way and then the
other, the Danish Supreme Court finally ruled that he was not guilty after all
of hate speech and racism.

That, however, was not the end of the trials of Lars
Hedegaard. Some two weeks ago, he answered his front door to a man in his
twenties posing as a postman who fired a gun at his head and missed. Douglas
Murray reported that 70-year old Hedegaard punched him in the head; the man
dropped the gun, picked it up and fired again. The gun then jammed and the man ran off. According
to Hedegaard, he looked like a ‘typical Muslim immigrant’. Hedegaard has had to
leave his home for an undisclosed location under police protection.

The attempted murder of Lars Hedegaard for speaking out
against Islamist violence has received virtually no public attention – except in
Sweden. As reported here,
several Swedish newspapers published wicked distortions about him in order to
portray him entirely falsely as an acknowledged racist.

Hedegaard’s Free Press Society campaigns for the rights
of journalists and cartoonists to express themselves without fear of being murdered.
Now an attempt has been made to murder Hedegaard himself, after he was dragged
through the courts in an attempt to stifle his warnings about Islamic violence
by labelling these protests ‘hate crime’.

Yet far from the uproar one might expect in any sane
and decent society following these attempts to destroy both the reputation and
the life of a man who fights for freedom from tyranny, Hedegaard finds himself
now victimised three times over – by the Danish judicial system, a fanatical
would-be assassin and a European liberal class for whom fighting Muslim
extremism and violence constitutes ‘Islamophobia’ and must be stopped.

The message from this most chilling tale of our times is
that in Sweden and other western ‘progressive’ circles, anyone who protests at
the phenomenon of ‘honour violence’ that terrorises Muslim women and children is
a racist; and if a supposed Islamic fanatic tries to murder that protester, well,
that just proves what a racist the protester is.

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31 January 2013 7:30 PM

The agony of the US Republicans, engulfed by an
existential crisis since the second term victory of Barack Obama, reminds me so
much of the UK Conservatives’ similar crisis after the accession of Tony Blair
to power in 1997.

That victory ushered in a three-term Labour hegemony.
The Tories, aghast at the inversion of the natural order by which they assumed
they had a divine right to rule, looked in bewildered mortification upon the
upstart Blair whom they found it impossible to dislodge -- and arrived at
precisely the wrong conclusion about both conservatism and British society. It
was a fundamental error that I believe the Conservative Party is still
making – and if they aren’t careful, the US Republicans will fall into the same
trap.

The root of the error was to misunderstand both why the
Tories lost power in 1997 and the appeal of Tony Blair. They looked at Blair--
young, telegenic, hip, with his jeans and his guitar and his ‘hey man’ and his ‘I
feel your pain’, and they were torn between thinking he was a cynical charlatan
and alternatively that he won power because he was in tune with Britain’s shift
towards a more caring, sharing, emoting, tolerant, liberal society.

Wrong on all counts. Blair won above all because the
Tories had made themselves unelectable. The government of John Major, which
took over after the reginacide of Margaret Thatcher, had become a national
joke, an embarrassment, a synonym for sleaze, arrogance and supreme incompetence.
Moreover, a number of Tory MPs just
looked ... well, totally weird. The whole lot of them were viewed as totally
beneath contempt and wholly unfit for government.

Blair saw his opportunity – but having concluded about
his own party that its left-wing positions had made it unelectable, he
took a leaf out his friend Bill Clinton’s book and triangulated his message.
While remaining committed under the radar to extreme, indeed revolutionary left-wing
positions – the erosion of sovereignty by closer union with the EU, mass third
world immigration, multiculturalism, gay rights -- he sent out the (misleading)
message that he was instinctively on the side of Middle Britain and would put
right what worried them most. This was above all intolerable levels of crime
and disorder and poor education standards, which in turn stood proxy for a
feeling that society was breaking down.

Utterly failing to understand any of this, the Conservative
party promptly fell apart. Not for nothing is it called ‘the stupid party’. Concluding
that Blair possessed some shaman-like property to bewitch the electorate, and themselves
still viewing every issue through the prism of economics (aka making money),
they failed completely to grasp that socialism had not been defeated but had
simply morphed into a mind-bending culture war against the fundamental tenets
of western civilisation. Failing accordingly to grasp that language itself had
been hijacked – with words such as ‘tolerance’, ‘equality’, freedom’, ‘compassion’
and many such others having been turned into their polar opposite and with the
term ‘right-wing’ having become a synonym for ‘enemy of humanity’, they made
two disastrous strategic errors.

The first was to circle the wagons by making shrill statements
about issues like immigration or the EU. But these Tories seemed to be the same
old clapped-out, weird and sleazy bunch that had been thrown out; and their
shrillness was no more than a retreat to their old comfort-zone which they had
themselves managed to discredit, rather than a proper dissection of the true
threat posed to ordinary peopleby their purported left-wing champions,
not just in politics but throughout the politically correct cultural
establishment.

The second error they made was to reverse themselves
and conclude, under David Cameron, that the reason they lost three general
elections to Labour was that the Tories were seen as ‘the nasty’ party – and that
they therefore had to ‘decontaminate the brand’ by being seen as tolerant, compassionate,
equality and freedom-loving as the left. So the Cameroons swore undying commitment
to the National Health Service, ring-fenced international aid, created a minister
for (ie against) climate change, mounted campaigns against bankers and promoted
gay rights.

And when they failed to win the 2010 general election,
forcing them into coalition with the extreme left Liberal Democrats, the
Cameroons said the reason was they hadn’t been left-wing enough. The
outcome is widespread contempt on both left and right for the
Conservative party– which has also managed to put itself on the wrong side of
the culture war. It is significant in this regard that, even while Americans despair
over their future under their President’s leadership, Cameron reportedly swoons
over Obama’s political skills.

The recent history of the US Republicans is a very
similar series of misreadings and strategic errors. Outraged and bamboozled in
equal measure by the mysteriously enduring popularity of Bill Clinton, the Republicans
decided that they too had to triangulate. The result was George W Bush’s ‘compassionate
conservatism’ –his now almost forgotten signature motif before he was engulfed
by Iraq – which became synonymous with big government and huge rises in public expenditure
which all but bankrupted the country.

Facing a ruthlessly partisan media class that was determined
to bring Bush down over Iraq and then to install Barack Obama through a
wholesale corruption of truth and journalism, the Republicans panicked by circling
their own wagons. Ill-served by the inflammatory shrillness of talk radio and Fox
News, they failed to stamp upon the crazies and weirdos emerging in the
slipstream of the mainstream Tea Party movement and allowed them to define the
Republican Party in the public mind. They thus gave the impression they were
incapable of thinking other than on extreme tramlines. And in the insulated
arrogance of those who believe they are born to rule, they thought it was
inconceivable they could lose.

Most disastrously of all, they failed to understand the
true contours of the culture war. As a result, they failed to confront properly
what needed to be confronted, while simultaneously making enemies of those who
should have been their allies. So for example, the Republicans no less than the
Democrats bought
heavily into the lethal myth of the ‘moderate’ Muslim Brotherhood – while managing,
through their undiscriminating anti-immigration posture, to hack off those many
Hispanic voters who should have been their natural constituency because these
voters are in many respects on the right side of the culture war.

Now there are signs that some Republicans at least are
beginning to understand this. While siren
voices still insist that the only way back to power is to commit ideological
suicide, others like Bobby
Jindal and Newt Gingrich appear to realise that the party has to change in
ways which don’t have to sell the civilisational pass in order to connect with decency
and reality.

We have yet to see whether, issue by issue, they
finally get this right. But if they need a good example, they certainly should not
look across the pond.

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30 January 2013 8:50 AM

With the row then still raging over the Lib Dem MP
David Ward’s attack upon Jews for not learning the lessons of the Holocaust and
oppressing the Palestinians, the Sunday Times published last weekend a cartoon
by Gerald Scarfe depicting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a
demonic builder walling up Palestinians with cement stained red with their
blood.

Today, the new acting editor of the Sunday Times,
Martin Ivens, was meeting representatives of British Jews to express his
contrition, while the paper’s proprietor Rupert Murdoch himself apologised for
this ‘grotesque and offensive’ cartoon.

Ivens, to whom I directly worked for three years when I
wrote for the Sunday Times, is a decent person without a shred of anti-Jewish
or anti-Israel feeling. And the Sunday Times is more supportive of Israel than
most.

Scarfe has expressed regret, but only for unwittingly
publishing the cartoon on Holocaust Memorial Day. Apparently, it would have
been absolutely fine to publish at any other time. Scarfe’s cartoons generally
reflect boiler-plate leftie attitudes. Very likely he would be outraged to be
accused of antisemitism, since in his mind he was only savaging the Israeli
Prime Minister as he does countless other world leaders.

Yet his cartoon did incorporate ancient motifs
of Jew-hatred. So how could he draw such a thing, and how could the Sunday
Times have published it?

The answer to the last question is as yet unknown; very
often, however, such debacles occur as a result of decisions which fall through
the cracks as part of deadline-pressured newspaper life.

Nevertheless, the assumptions behind the drawing of
this cartoon flow directly from the intellectual sewage now poisoning British
attitudes towards Israel and the Middle East.

The cartoon was monstrous because it portrayed
Netanyahu as a psychopath using the blood of Palestinians to cement them into
the evil wall he was building.

It thus fused antisemitic images and grotesque lies
about Israel -- an infernal cocktail which is now the mandatory accessory of
the British intelligentsia, even as this cocktail incites violence and mass
murder by Arabs and Muslims across the world.

Murdering innocents and using their blood for demonic
purposes is the essence of the ancient antisemitic ‘blood libel’, which fuelled
the medieval Christian pogroms and is now regularly used in the Arab and Muslim
world to incite its demented hatred of Jews.

As for the cartoon’s message, it is simply obscene to
accuse Netanyahu of brutally murdering Palestinians. It is Palestinians who set
out to murder Jews, something the security ‘wall’ – actually mostly a wire
fence – aims to prevent. And in its military actions against Palestinian mass
murderers, Israel goes to heroic lengths -- unknown in any other country -- to
try to shield the innocent from harm.

So Scarfe’s message is a Big Lie about Israel. As I
wrote here,
it is these Big Lies reversing victim and aggressor in the Middle East which
are so obscene.

And the fusion of such bigotry against Israel with
bigotry against Jews is characteristic of Israel-hatred, which does indeed
represent a modern mutation of antisemitism.

This is why.

Antisemitism has certain specific features which make
it a unique form of bigotry. It is founded upon unshakeable beliefs which are
in fact total lies; it is deeply irrational and immune to factual evidence; it
accuses Jews of atrocities of which they are not only innocent but of which they
are in fact the victims; it singles them out for double standards by expecting
them to behave in ways expected of no-one else; it holds falsely that they form
global conspiracies of manipulative influence; and it is utterly,
pathologically obsessive about the Jews and their alleged cosmic misdeeds.

All these characteristic apply to Israel-hatred. Which
is why those who give vent to it can’t seem to avoid reaching for the stereotypes
and calumnies of ancient Jew-hatred. Reasoned criticism of Israel is entirely
legitimate; but this pathological Israel-hatred is fundamentally anti-Jew.

That does not mean that all those who give
expression to it are themselves necessarily hostile to Jews. Some undoubtedly
are; others may think about Jews benignly with one part of their brain, but
towards Israel they feel only an overwhelming, implacable, obsessional hatred.

Such people have unwittingly bought into a discourse
about Israel based on Jew-hatred. They may well be quite unaware of this, being
ignorant of the historical resonances. But that does not alter the fact
they are voicing the latest mutation of Jew-hatred – from theology to race, and
now to nation. And the fact that ancient antisemitic imagery bubbles up in
their minds without their even realising what it is makes this no less
horrifying.

A heated discussion on BBC Radio’s Today Programme
this morning between the Jewish Chronicle editor Stephen Pollard and the Guardian
cartoonist Steve Bell all too vividly illustrated the uniquely sanctimonious
venom, ignorance and humbug of the Israel-hater.

Bell was himself at the centre of a similar controversy
last year when the Guardian published his
cartoon showing Netanyahu as a puppeteer manipulating both Tony Blair and
Britain’s current Foreign Secretary William Hague, against the background of
bombs represented as Israeli flags.

Bell’s irritated defence this morning of his own
cartoon was risible – apparently Netanyahu was not a ‘puppet-master’ because
the figures of Blair and Hague were merely ‘pathetic’; nor could the cartoon
have presented Jews as ‘manipulative evil geniuses’ since it wasn’t about Jews
at all, only Netanyahu.

It is of course possible that Bell simply doesn’t
understand the enduring significance of the antisemitic image of Jews as
master-puppeteers manipulating the world for their own evil ends. But then he
said this:

‘The problem with the state of Israel and the Zionist
lobby is that they never acknowledge the crime of ethnic cleansing on which the
state was founded.’

So his target was not just Netanyahu but the very
existence of the State of Israel. Now we can see what actually lay behind his
cartoon and his outraged defence of it. For Bell, Israel is itself a tyrannical
entity which perpetrated the greatest possible atrocity upon the supposedly
rightful inhabitants of the land, the Palestinians, by driving them out. For
Bell, it is now clear, the outrage is not the behaviour of Netanyahu but the
fact that Israel exists at all.

But of course, Bell’s belief is the very opposite of
the truth. It was not the Arabs who were ethnically cleansed from Palestine; it
was the Arabs who tried to ethnically cleanse the Jews from there, by
mounting a war of extermination against the re-established Jewish homeland. It
was the Jews, not the Arabs, who were the ethnic group with the overwhelming
historical, moral and legal claim to the land, as the international community
had recognised. And it was Jews – some 800,000 of them -- who really were then
ethnically cleansed from Arab countries and who found refuge in Israel.

But then Bell does not appear to understand the moral
difference between tyrants and their victims. For he also observed that no-one
had objected to Scarfe’s cartoon the previous week which portrayed Syria’s
President Assad slicing the head off a baby. It is certainly true that Scarfe
has often drawn such images of Assad, such as this
one, or this
one, and regularly depicts tyrants steeped in blood.

But the crucial point is that Netanyahu is not a
tyrant who murders innocents; Assad is. Netanyahu is defending his
people against mass murder; Assad has been deliberately killing thousands
of his own citizens in order to suppress revolution. Bell’s comparison is
morally obtuse to a quite staggering degree. He appears not to understand the
difference between a crime against humanity and the protection against a
crime against humanity.

Last weekend’s cartoon was the third in recent years
published by a UK national newspaper to have grotesquely libelled Israel and
drawn upon antisemitic imagery to do so. The first in this series of shame, by Dave
Brown in the Independent in 2003, depicted a monstrous Ariel Sharon, then
Israel’s Prime Minister, biting the head off a Palestinian baby. It was another
blood libel – yet Brown disingenuously claimed it was merely a pastiche of
Goya’s painting Saturn Devouring His Children.

In a pointed comment, Britain’s cartoon establishment
honoured Brown’s drawing by designating it Political Cartoon of the Year.
Today, the LibDems have merely given David Ward a mild rap over the knuckles in
a yellow card
censure. Scarfe and Bell will continue to have their cartoons published,
and will continue to be lionised, as if nothing had happened; and Britain’s
intelligentsia, BBC and other media will continue to paint Israel as brutal
aggressors and the Palestinians as their victims.

When future historians come to record Britain’s tragic
decline, they will surely place its sickening behaviour towards the Jewish
people, first under its control in Palestine and then in the State of Israel,
as both symptom and cause of its moral and civilisational collapse.